Please forgive this brief diversion from our regular posting schedule–we promise to make it quick!

For those of you who have made the very valid case that there’s nothing quite like holding a real book in your hands, we’ve been listening. That’s why I am so happy to announce a recent printing experiment was a success and, now, we have printed copies of the ebook available for order. Hooray! You may purchase a 6″ x 9″ printed paperback copy via Paypal either through the link in this post (it won’t appear in your RSS feed, so click through to see it) or from the ebook website buying page. The cost is $6.50, plus $3 for shipping and handling (or $6 outside the USA). If all goes as planned, fingers crossed!, they should be able to reach you by Christmas*.

Book (domestic or international)

Autographed

Contact us with any questions! Or, you can read more about the book, including feedback that’s come in, at the ebook site.

*Note that we’ll be printing books to order, which means there’s around a two- to three-week waiting period between placing your order and receiving your book, dictated mostly by our printer and the post office.

It’s here. The ebook I’ve been telling you about for two weeks and working on since July is published, available, ready to be read. I am sitting here looking at the photo of it in my hands, with a (gorgeous! beyond-my-expectations!) cover designed by Nashville artist Rebekka Seale, who, it should be noted, came up with the entire thing based on a few sentences of explanation from me on what the book was about and a “Everything you make is beautiful, so I trust you. Go!” (Look at it. You see why I said that? Amazing.)

Tim and I put up a book website that will give you more information about the book: a sample page, FAQs, a sort of summary and so on.

One big thing to clarify: You do not have to have a Kindle to read it. You do have to have the Kindle app, which is free and can be downloaded to your Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc. (Links here.)

But right before you do, may I suggest, watch this video book trailer? My brother—the one and only—made it for us as a gift (and, he might not say this but I will, as a huge demonstration of his talent and creative eye!). It’s so good, it’s so us and, it hopefully gives you a tiny taste of what the book is like.

Beyond that, I have nothing else to say but thank you, every one of you, even though saying that feels like not enough. Thank you for reading this post and for sharing our joy and for making this blog community such a beautiful place to be. We hope you enjoy this book as much as we have enjoyed you.

…Tim and I sat outside in the beautiful October sunlight on Wednesday and made you a quick little (five-minute) video. In it, we tell you a little bit more about our daily lives, never explain where we are or why there’s a spread of food before us while we do (it was a picnic! and Tim was shooting another video for his day job!) as well as, spoiler alert!, make an exciting announcement about something big coming to the blog soon. (!!!!)

Four years into blogging (as of tomorrow!), I have a confession to make: sometimes I ask why am I blogging and forget what I’m doing here. For a while I thought this was a photography blog. My posts revolved around my pictures, which I was spending lots of time trying to improve. Then, it was business. I looked for ways to monetize, testing ad spaces and selling statistics. It’s been design-focused, while we’ve changed the layout and header more times than I care to count. It’s also been about food and about compiling more original recipes, since everyone says that’s how to stand out.

But while I was home in Chicago, spending an evening with Jacqui, a friend whose perspective on blogging has always been authentic and grounded and right, we got talking about blogs and about writing, and it hit me: somehow, in the last few months and years of changing styles and formats and direction, I’ve forgotten the heart of this place.

Because no matter why you start out blogging—to practice your art, to build community, to tell your stories—it’s not long before you start to feel pulled towards another goal: to be noticed. All bloggers want to be noticed; all writers want to be read. It’s natural. And you look around and there are bloggers getting endorsements and bloggers quitting their day jobs and bloggers with fan clubs the size of celebrities’, and you think, does what I’m doing matter at all? Why am I blogging anyway? It’s basic human nature to want someone to care about you, to want to be known; and listen, as any blogger would tell you: keeping up a website takes work and time, but for most of us, instead of getting a paycheck at the end of our work days, we get the satisfaction of knowing other people who like what we do, too.

Last month, when my brother was in town, we spent a night with friends at Arrington Vineyards, located about 25 minutes south of Nashville. During the summer, Arrington is probably my favorite place to have a picnic—free music on weekends, a setting of rolling hills, vineyard views and space farther out in the country. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think about picnicking and why it’s so enjoyable—which is exactly why I loved reading a recent post from Tea & Cookies. In it, she says this:

The thing about picnics I think is this: they are less of a meal and more of a celebration. There may be food involved, but the point is not simply to eat—you could do that at your desk, standing over the kitchen sink, in your car. This is not about feeding. The point about a picnic is to enjoy.

Picnics slow things down, they make you step back and notice. The way the light filters through the trees. The sound of the water as is splashes over the locks. The feeling of grass on bare feet. Picnics feed all our senses.

With that in mind, here are some photos of things I stepped back to notice at Arrington, as well as some thought-provoking quotes from a book I just finished, “Writing Down the Bones,” in which Natalie Goldberg talks about what it means to be “‘writing down the bones,’ the essential, awake speech of [our] minds.”[Read more…]

While we’re in Chicago, we spend a night driving around my hometown, past the Riverwalk and up side streets, through neighborhoods and by a big barn, looking for a white wall that we can take self-timer pictures against. I keep saying to Tim, thank you for doing this! for putting up with my crazy! for letting me pursue this idea of a blog header with our picture in it! and he looks at me, and he’s like, What? I want to do this, too!

And a few hours later, here is what we have:

My friend Kendra tells me how my writing is so much more me since I’ve met Tim and how that’s indicative of the kind of marriage in which I’m loved well and so, free to be more of who I am. I tell her that’s a lovely thought and one I hope is true and that Tim’s a good gift, I see it more every day, in the way he gives me his time and his ear and, one night in Naperville, Illinois, hours of self-timed photos.[Read more…]

I was standing at the kitchen sink today, washing dishes and watching the sky grow darker with rain clouds out the window, when my eyes settled on the tree in our front yard.

It’s bright green right now–filled with huge, vibrant leaves that have changed its outline from bare branches to an enormous globe that hides our front porch and door. I’ve watched that tree change from green to golden to bare and back again over the last three seasons in this house, and today it hit me how much I love seeing it happen.

I love looking outside and seeing the world change with sun and rain and snow and cold. I love seeing the faithfulness of creation, of the earth’s seasons that parallel our own. It makes me feel thankful.

This, as simple of an example as it may be, is the kind of thing I’ve heard Ann Voskamp talks about in her best-selling book, “One Thousand Gifts.” After I watched her interviews on YouTube the other day (View them here: Part 1, Part 2), I haven’t been able to shake her idea to name the things we love–from our families to the way the sun looks when it hits the front porch–and give thanks for them.

We’ve had a busy few days around here, we’re off to Ohio tomorrow to spend the Easter weekend with family and I don’t have a new recipe to post, but I wanted to post this simple thought anyway–because sometimes it’s in the sharing of these kinds of things that we taste the most joy.

We did it. Three weeks ago Saturday, on a beautiful October afternoon, after about six months of planning and close to two years of knowing each other, Tim and I took our first steps together as man and wife.

Looking back now, it feels like a blur. I knew it would go by quickly and that, partway through it, I’d want to slow things down: if the weeks leading up to your wedding feel busy, the day-of feels overwhelming, exciting, like you can’t believe what is happening is really happening and now it’s happening too fast, too good, too much like you wish it wouldn’t end.

So many times I’d look at Tim and think, This is happening! He’s my husband! This is our wedding! We’re really doing this! And, wherever we were at that moment, he’d be taking my hand to move me towards the next thing, and there we’d go, doing it, living it, having our photos taken and eating a meal and hugging people who told us they loved us.

Now that we’re back and home and getting settled, I’m ready to come back to this place and start talking about food and cooking and what that looks like lately. But before I do, in the spirit of those wedding blogs I was reading so frequently for six months, today I’m bringing you a wedding-detail post, complete with what we loved, what went wrong, and info on all our vendors, from my dress to the caterers. Here we go.

From the beginning, one thing I’m really glad about is that Tim and I helped each other keep perspective: the only thing we HAD to have happen all day was that a husband and a wife emerged at the end of it (and we did!). When things went wrong—just a few little things did—we took it in our stride and, thanks to the love and support of our friends and family, ended up with options even better than what we’d planned, if you can believe it. When we couldn’t get the giant yellow trees for the ceremony we’d wanted because they lost all their leaves four days beforehand, my friend Carrie called a florist and booked us tall, yellow gladiolas; when the place where we had planned to do our “first look” told us they charged $150 to take photos (!!??), we nixed it and went down the street to a quiet forest preserve. And when the single violinst we’d booked for the ceremony got deathly ill on her way over and never showed up, my friend Becky saved the day by improvising music for the prelude, the processional and the recessional—all on top of already singing. I loved that. She was amazing.

Another thing we really loved was doing so many things nontraditionally—it’s what made the wedding feel like us. We saw each other before the wedding and ate lunch together in our wedding clothes, sitting at my parents’ kitchen’s breakfast bar, with people from the bridal party all around, before heading to the church. Tim’s dad performed the wedding at a chapel so beautiful we didn’t need decorations (except those gladiolas!) in a service that felt really meaningful and reflective of who we are. Our bridal party, wearing whatever they wanted, didn’t stand on stage with us but rather came up for a dedication prayer, circling around us as three people led aloud—and that was one of my favorite parts of the whole October wedding day.

I loved riding to the church with my parents, and hearing my dad get choked up as he talked to me about an hour or so before I said I do. I loved sitting in an empty room just before the ceremony with only my brother, the person who’s been my best friend since we were kids, and joking with him about running away like both of us knew I’d never do. I loved feeling so calm before walking down the aisle, so sure of what I was doing, like I knew it was right, like I knew I was marrying the best guy I know.

I loved everyone who came, everyone who rejoiced with us, everyone who helped us (and there were a lot of people who helped us). I loved looking around at so many familiar faces and being introduced to faces I’d never seen before. I loved knowing people traveled from other states to be there, to show us their support.

And I loved our reception. Oh, our reception. I remember five or so years ago, when a friend of mine got married, telling her the only thing I knew I wanted if I got married someday was a fall wedding in my parents’ backyard. Now, I can’t believe that’s exactly what we got. We had the dinner in a big white tent and I swear it felt like pure magic: long tables with burlap runners and white tea lights, live jazz music, family-style dining, a cookie table, a pumpkin wedding cake, grass beneath my feet and my new husband by my side.

Tim and I ate at our wedding—I mean, we ate—a full meal, and a really good one. After the appetizers, there were fresh rolls with pumpkin butter, a salad with pecans and feta, green beans, roasted vegetables, petit filet mignons, wild salmon filets, butternut squash ravioli.

And before I could think about it, the day was ending. My friend Jackie, whom I’ve known since she was in junior high and I was a sophomore in high school, was giving an amazing toast that made me both laugh and cry, and people were standing up and saying things about what a great man Tim is, and we were walking around greeting friends, wishing for more time to talk to them, and then we were inside changing clothes, leaving through a path of sparklers held by our wedding guests, screaming and shouting and cheering us goodbye.

Driving away from my parents’ house, Tim and I talked about everything. We talked about the wedding, about our friends, about what we had thought and what we had seen, and I held his hand and I looked at his ring and I called him my husband and he called me his wife, and we knew this was big, this day, this commitment, this new family we had made.

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"That's at the root of all giving, don't you think? At the root of all art. You can't hoard the beauty you've drawn into you; you've got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You've just got to." Elizabeth Goudge

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkien

"Every kind word spoken, every meal proffered in love, every prayer said, can become a feisty act of redemption that communicates a reality opposite to the destruction of a fallen world." Sarah Clarkson